Immortals of Aveum™

Maybe wait for a sale. The gameplay is fun. Movement is speedy, combat is tight. The story has a bit of the young adult novel syndrome, but it's not bad, just sadly not too special. If you like linear games with exploration and fighting arenas, give it a go.

Had a lot of fun, wish there was going to be a sequel. Due to New-Game Plus, just focus on the main mission and then restart for collectibles. All Completed Dialogue Options, Chests, and Shroudfanes carry over even though they reset, just look for the ones you missed.

Game is poorly optimized and runs poorly for many people, even those with more than adequate hardware. The game would honestly have done much better if they'd released it at a different time and if the recommended specs weren't so high. The "minimum" specs listed are a joke, because the game is basically unplayable with older hardware. It's a shame, because there's some enjoyable gameplay here. I also didn't hate the story and characters as much as many other people seem to. I just wish I could have gotten a consistent, playable framerate.

Another middling game in a bloated market. You can have fun, sure. Nothing about this says it was worth $70, or the time. I paid $6 for it, and got my money out of it. This is what you get when you have people who don't understand the gaming market. The devs are babies, who publicly whined and blamed the audience instead of reflecting inward on their failures. It's from too much positivity in school, and not being challenged. the head of this studio only knew how to continue working a cash cow, but not building one. The hardware demands are insane, and offer poor performance. My 3070 can't keep 60 fps at 1080, on LOW settings. The install size is huge. The devs didn't optimize anything here. Clearly they were the B team at their prior studios. The gameplay is borderline infantilizing, and there's nothing new here. The game is mostly puzzles too. Not well designed, and in abundance. It has a AAA price tag, but is barely a AA game. The story is stupid, the cut scenes can't be skipped. It's a poorly done Marvel type story, but C level writing. The ending is a mess, with everyone switching sides at will. The failure of this game was obvious, and shows how out of touch studios are with gamers. The fact that they paid for Denuvo really shows their hubris, and that their failure was deserved. This was the end of studios thinking they could ♥♥♥♥ out whatever they want, and people would buy it. They were wrong. The reasons why this game failed are obvious, and I'm surprised the company had the balls to put this out. They should be embarrassed by this.

Fun combat, smooth gameplay, terrible writing and irritating dialogue delivery of the protagonist. Still, at 90% discount, it is a steal. World design is excellent, heavily inspired from Divinity Original Sin and Mass Effect/ Dragon Age. Plays great on Linux, on PS5 equivalent specs and SteamOS, locked 1440p 60fps FSR balanced, with custom fan curve for 6700 XT and ReBAR enabled, mix of high (textures) and low settings. They have definitely optimized the game a lot after initial launch. Also, it does not actually need EA account to play; we can skip the login and play offline.

Out of the three magic shooters I've played (Ghostwire: Tokyo, Hogwarts Legacy and this) this game had imo by far the best/most fun combat. The writing of this is pretty weak though, it has very MCU-ish dialoge, for example at one point a character literally says "He's right behind me, isn't he?". However, it's nowhere near Forspoken levels of cringe. If you get it on sale, when it only costs 8.99$/€, then it's worth every penny. I'd give this game a solid 8.2/10

3/5 The phrase that comes to mind is "Functionally mediocre". It's not a bad game, in fact, pretty fun at times, but at others is frustrating and has a lackuster story. I'd say it's worth $20-30 if you like fast pace FPS games. The basic premise is that magic exists, in the form of 3 colours - red, green and blue - and there is a millenia long war going on over it - your character is a special magni called a triarch that can weild all three types. There's a bad guy, an elite order that recruits you, you get the gist. Story wise, it's fine. It was interesting enough to justify the gameplay, but I've already forgotten most of it. I found it odd that they would refer to the magic by simple colour, rather than have a specific name for each, or at least some more intense sounding shade (sapphire for blue as an example). It kind of ruined the immersion for me. The characters are also fine. Some of the dialogue is annoying and pointless, with lots of quippy or awkward moments. This was another immersion breaking problem, but the main cast is doing an excellent job delivering it, so it's a wash. Graphically, it certainly looks nice. Very colourful and bright to match the fantasy atmosphere. I did have some stuttering problems at first, but after switching to my main hard drive it wasn't an issue. There are RPG elements that allow you to upgrade each branch of magic. Some of the upgrades interact with the other branches, which makes for powerful combinations. The Blink Dash for instance can be upgraded so that it resets the cooldown on your Shield spell, making a very nice defensive combo. The main draw of this game will be the gameplay. I would say it's very good. Controls are quick and snappy, weapons feel good. The only problem I have is that there are a LOT of controls. You have to cycle your 3 main weapons (RGB) as well as 3 "Control" abilities. Then there are 6 attack spells, a shield spell, blink dash, melee, sprint, jump, health and mana crystals. You effectively need 15 on demand buttons, and 2 more to cycle. It took me a while and several remaps to get to a usable layout on the keyboard and mouse. The defaults are obviously made with a controller in mind, but I didn't try it. That said, once I got used to it, the combat is solid. Boss fights are really good. They require you to switch between your abilities and slowly wear the enemy down. Other than one particular fight that you have to repeat 5 times, these are a highlight. However, encounters with normal enemies are really disappointing. The game commits several of the cardinal sins here, not least of which is enemies spawning behind you. It's also really weird that the enemies always teleport in when you approach an area. They are never standing there waiting for you to approach, even when you are supposedly following them. They instead (literally) magically appear to fight you. There is zero explanation for this, and it was another immersion breaking problem. On top of it, many of the "normal" enemies are absolute health sponges, taking dozens of hits to bring down, even when using the attack spells and hitting critical locations. Some of them also have absurdly good aim and AOE. In comparison, you are a glass cannon. You cannot tank hits unless you have certain upgrades, and even then many of the enemies can kill you with 2-3 hits. The health system is very limiting here. The main way to get health back is through crystals, of which you can only carry 3 (4 if upgraded) at a time. I found myself in several encounters where I was swarmed by hardhitting enemies and had to burn all my crystals, only for there to be none to pick up after the fight. There are other methods, but they involve being in active combat, and are extremely limited. On the plus side, you don't die instantly. It seems that when you take fatal damage the game gives you a chance to evade and heal, but the next hit will get you. It's a nice touch. Outside of the main story there is a world to explore and puzzles to solve etc. I didn't bother with most of it. Mostly because it was clear that I needed equipment or skills that I did not have when I first encoutered a locked area, so I wasn't going to waste my time going back. The rewards for exploration are also uninteresting. Usually just currency to upgrade your gear, with the occasional item that almost always wasn't as good as what I already had. If I wanted to, I'm sure I could put another 10 hours in to seek it all out, but the game world isn't interesting enough for that. All in all, worth the 14 hours I played it to beat the campaign, but I have no intentions of playing it any further. Apparently it was the studios first game - so, pretty good, not great. Lots of good ideas, and lots of room for improvement.

Wish I could give a game "Recommended with reservation". Gameplay is very good and if you have an HDR monitor with a good GPU the particle effects are sick. On the other hand, there is no narrative worth following and the dialogue has to be some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. Just skip the cutscenes/dialogue right? Nope all cutscenes are not skippable. I just had a Youtube video on the side that I would watch during cutscenes.